Explorations in the virtual world

XFire Plugin

The current version of XFire Stats Plugin is 0.4, and requires PHP 4.0.2 or greater.

v0.1 — initial test
v0.2 — added Widget Title option
v0.3 — curl_setopts_array unavailable before PHP 5.0, use curl_setopt for PHP 4 compatibility.
v0.4 — typo in the linkage into XFire for the games.
v0.5 — first alpha release, added ‘now playing’ box, fixed bad link for Wizard 101, fixed parsing bug for games with apostrophes in the title.
v0.6 — Rewrite the way options are saved.
v0.7 — Pages from XFire.com are cached for five minutes to ease server load on busy blogs. Fall back to vanilla file transfer to get XFire data if libcurl is not installed.

Issues

The plugin’s guess as to XFire’s page for a game is sometimes wrong.

Announcing the XFire Stats WordPress Plugin. This plugin adds a widget that you can place on the sidebar of your WordPress blog to show your gaming stats for the past week — the title and time spent, sorted by decreasing time.

This is the very first release of this, my very first plugin, and feedback is definitely encouraged.

To install:

Right click on this link and choose “Save Link As…” and name it ‘xfirestats.zip’.

Unzip this file to find ‘xfirestats.php’

Upload ‘xfirestats.php’ to the plugins folder of your WordPress installation — http://yourblog.com/wp-content/plugins/ might be the spot, but there will definitely be other plugins there. Automatic installation is coming.

Cool! Glad you like it! I really need to get it put into the WP Plugin repository. I have an idea for another one — one that lets commentators know if the post to which they are commenting is old or not. This would help with the comments like, “Wizard 101 came out six months ago! Why are you talking about it as if it were in beta?” — on articles from last year’s beta. I used to just have comments turned off on older posts.